It will soon be possible to establish what acreage and value of land is owned by all co-operative societies in Kenya.
The state will also be able to quantify the amount of investments made by co-operative societies in different sectors such as housing, agriculture, financial sector, transport, manufacturing, small businesses, education, health, mining and so on.
It is against these objectives that the State Department for Co-operatives is seeking to procure consulting firms with adequate capacity to undertake consultancy service for a nationwide Co-operative Sector Survey.
The Department has thus invited technical and financial proposals from eligible consulting firms to undertake the exercise.
Bids must be delivered to the Principal Secretary, Department for Co-operatives, on or before December 23rd, 2019.
It is envisaged that this data will be available and accessible through the Co-operative Management Information System (CMIS). Further, the survey will entail collection, collation and analysis of data from the co-operative sector.
Since 2013, challenges have emerged in the compilation and subsequent reporting on co-operative performance and status as annual reports from counties are no longer submitted to the state department.
The National Co-operative Policy identifies lack of Co-operative data and statistics for aggregation into the national economic statistics (GDP, Savings, Investments, Employment) to inform policy.
This survey is thus intended to develop a co-operative disaggregated data base at the State Department for Co-operatives to enhance availability of credible information on Co-operatives.
The main objective of the survey is to establish the economic contribution of co-operatives to the Kenyan economy.
The specific objectives will be to establish contribution of co-operatives to various economic sectors, contribution of co-operatives to national savings, national tax revenue, waged employment and to develop a standard reporting template for periodic data collection and reporting.
The scope of this survey will involve collecting data nationally on all registered co-operatives in Kenya. The parameters include number of co-operatives registered (active, dormant and cancelled), distribution of co-operatives by county and distribution of co-operatives by nature of business: SACCOs –(Deposit Taking Saccos and Non-Deposit Taking Saccos), marketing, housing, consumer, investments, multi-purpose, transport and others).
The survey will also cover distribution of co-operatives by type of activities/commodities (hand crafts, sand harvesting, coffee, dairy, housing, savings and credit, transport, fishing, horticulture, bee keeping, cereals, legumes, industrial ,tea, cotton, pyrethrum, timber, etc) .
It will also collect data on classification of co-operatives per common bond (National government, county governments, state corporations, community based, faith based, diaspora, youth, etc.) to determine the effect of opening the common bond on growth of co-operatives.
Other key parameters include balance sheet size of the entire co-operative sector, members’ savings, loans and advances, share capital, profits/loss, returns to members, external funding, export earnings, volume of production, total turnover as well as Levies and licenses paid to various government agencies.
Preliminary figures from the State Department for Co-operatives indicate that there are 23,000 registered cooperative societies and a total membership of 14 million.
The Co-operative sector is estimated to have KSh732 billion in members’ savings, balance sheet size of KSh 1 Trillion and Loan portfolio of more than KSh 700 billion.
